Multi-objective optimization for perishable product dispatch in a FEFO system for a food bank single warehouse

Abstract

One of the main challenges of food bank warehouses in developing countries is to determine how to allocate perishable products to beneficiary agencies with different expiry dates while ensuring food safety, meeting nutritional requirements, and minimizing the shortage. The contribution of this research is to introduce a new multi-objective, multi-product, and multi-period perishable food allocation problem based on a single warehouse management system for a First Expired-First Out (FEFO) policy. Moreover, it incorporates the temporal aspect, guaranteeing the dispatch of only those perishable products that meet the prescribed minimum quality standards. A weighted sum approach converts the multi-objective problem of minimizing a vector of objective functions into a scalar problem by constructing a weighted sum of all the objectives. The problem can then be solved using a standard constrained optimization procedure. The proposed mixed integer linear model is solved by using the CPLEX solver. The solution obtained from the multi-objective problem allows us to identify days and products experiencing shortages. In such cases, when there is insufficient available inventory, the total quantity of product to be dispatched is redistributed among beneficiaries according to a pre-established prioritization. These redistributions are formulated as integer programming problems using a score-based criterion and solved by an exact method based on dynamic programming. Computational results demonstrate the applicability of the novel model for perishable items to a real-world study case.